The Mother Of Optimizations: Audit AdWords Landing Pages

It’s important to remember that AdWords only drives traffic to your site. The real challenge is getting them to do what you want them to do when they get there! Having relevant landing pages is crucial to this process. When users click on your ads, they have a certain expectation of what they’re going to find when they get to your site. Meeting this expectation is so important that a significant extent of AdWords’ quality ranking algorithm is based on it.

Because this is a series about AdWords, and not landing page optimizations, we’ll focus on top considerations for driving better AdWords performance via ad-to-landing page relevance.

Ads going to the most relevant landing page? — You can link ads to any page on your site, and it’s common for multiple landing pages to serve as equally reasonable destinations for your ads, in which case you can test. In some cases, however, there’s an obvious best landing page. For example, e-commerce sites featuring ads for specific products would want to point those ads a landing pages specific to that product, as opposed to a product category page, or homepage. If this is the case for your business, make sure all ads are pointing to the most relevant landing page.

Points to..

Expired Offers? — Make sure you’re not offering something in your ads that you’re not able to deliver on your site. If you’re featuring temporary offers or discounts, make sure to strip this messaging out of your ads once the offers end. This is a common oversight for accounts running large amounts of creatives.

Incorrect Pricing? — Does your pricing fluctuate? If so, make sure the current pricing is always state in your creatives. Featuring incorrect pricing information in your ads is a sure way to waste money on clicks and leave users frustrated.

Sitelinks pointing to useful landing pages? — You can add up to six additional landing page links to your ads via sitelinks. Think about where else it might be helpful to point a user who’s interested in what your creative is offering. Landing pages for sitelinks can be other related product pages, shipping and customer service pages, your homepage or blog, etc. Don’t waste an opportunity to give your users more options!

Points to…

Landing Page Contains a Strong Headline? — When users reach their landing page, make it obvious that it is indeed the page they expected by featuring a strong headline. For example, an ad featuring a specific product should link to a page featuring the title of that product prominently.

Landing Page Contains Clear Call-to-Action? — Once the user’s on the page and is ready to purchase, make it easy for them to do so by prominently featuring a strong call to action on the landing page.

While this list represents top considerations for optimizing landing pages for use with AdWords, this is by no means a complete list of website optimizations. For more on optimizing your website for higher conversion rates, check out our recent series on Conversion Rate Optimization.